


What Remains

by labingi



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon Era, M/M, Post-Barricade, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-06 14:03:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1107725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labingi/pseuds/labingi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of those fics where all of Les Amis die on the barricade except Enjolras and Grantaire.  Their first year of coping necessarily thrusts them together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Remains

**Author's Note:**

> Light "M" rating.

_June 20, 1832_

The knock at the door jerked Grantaire awake. He had forgotten to blow out the candle and felt like he’d scarcely slept at all. Rubbing his eyes, he rolled up off his bed and, tugging the door open, found himself staring stupidly at Enjolras.

“Oh, you are home.” Enjolras' cravat was askew as was its wont by the evening. “It seemed rather early for you, but I was passing by...” 

“Come in, come in.” Grantaire wheeled back from the door, sitting heavily on his drinking chair, that is, the chair he sat in when he drank alone at home, which was more often these days.

Enjolras took the chair opposite and sat there, saying nothing.

It was the eighth time they'd met since that day. On that day they'd stood side by side prepared for death, only to have that quietus forestalled by--triumph, Grantaire supposed. The National Guardsmen were ordered to put down their weapons, and Enjolras had released his hand and been swept away on the current of his duties. Since then, they had met at seven funerals and barely spoken.

Grantaire reached for a bottle. It was less than a fourth full but he poured what was left into his glass. In a belated bid at hospitality, he proffered the glass to Enjolras, who shook his head. Grantaire drained it.

Enjolras looked at him somberly across the infinite expanse of the little, round table. “Have you been all right?”

Grantaire laughed and the laugh got away from him, tripped by sudden tears that he could not gather back in. And then, he was doubled over sobbing with the faces of his friends sticking like curses in his memory. Cursed to loss and loss and loss, and this, he thought, was how the Furies plagued men, not with talons but with men’s own hearts. From across the table, he felt Enjolras’ hand on his forearm, and it made him sob harder, partly from grief and partly from gratitude.

* * *

They were not friends after that. But it seemed to Grantaire they’d formed a tacit agreement to put up with each other--or rather, for Enjolras to put up with Grantaire, like some dissolute brother one can’t disown.

There were limits, of course. Grantaire woke up one morning to a shame-faced recollection of coming by Enjolras’ rooms and holding forth about the Persian Empire, balanced on Manichean scales till at length, the scales' tilt grew too ponderous and the they crashed asunder as they must in the end, and Enjolras had shouted, “I have work to do!” and thrust him out in the street.

Grantaire was well aware that Enjolras had work. He was at the Assembly all day most days, assembling new sets of colleagues as he assembled new laws and whatever things got assembled there. Grantaire, too, found himself settling into new routines with new friends--not men one would find in the Assembly. He brought Enjolras lunch sometimes, and they talked a little about nothing.

* * *

Indeed, they had nothing to talk about. When drunk, Grantaire could hold forth for hours, but Enjolras had always had small patience for cynical, circular rambling. Sober, Grantaire dared say little. Once, over lunch, he attempted genuine repartee. Enjolras had been extolling a piece of pending legislation to restrict the hours per day children under ten could be hired as labor. 

"Well and good," Grantaire said. "No one wants to see children worked to death. But say you get it passed. What of families who must send their children out to work or starve, what of orphans who must support themselves? They will go hungry--or hungrier. Or rather, because people have a singular impetus against starvation, they will put the children to work all the same at multiple jobs or they'll lie about the hours. And what of employers found guilty of infraction? They'll take their fines from the pay of their employees."

"It's a step," said Enjolras. "It is neither a simple nor complete solution, but what is your alternative? To sit there and do nothing?"

Grantaire grinned with a certain self-mockery and drained his wine glass.

"Yes, that is your alternative, isn't it?" 

The words had greater weight coming soon after a letter from Grantaire's father, in which he had accused his son of being a wastrel who ought to be disinherited. Grantaire, who had lately come into a small annuity from an aunt and was, thus, feeling somewhat independent, had been tempted to write back that his father was right and they were well rid of each other. But in the end, common sense won out, and he defended his worth lukewarmly by remarking that he had lately sold two portraits, which was true, though he'd completed both behind schedule and, therefore, seen his pay reduced. 

"I am who I am," he said to Enjolras. "We both know me too well for me to pretend otherwise."

* * *

Both keenly felt the lack a group to talk in, a middle ground to bridge the space between their ideas. So Grantaire agreed readily when Enjolras invited him to dinner with some of his new set, lawyers mainly. Indeed, he thought the evening went quite well with a certain buoyancy and ease in conversation. He was pleased to find himself encouraged to give his views at some length on Petronius and the atrophy of the Roman Empire.

The next day, he received a note from Enjolras:

_Grantaire,_

_I should know better than to expect you to behave as anything other than a drunken ass. I shall not make the mistake of inviting you to dine with us again._

_E._

The finality of the last line frightened Grantaire, not because he cared about dinner with politicians but because it smacked of euphemism for a more total severance. Without delay, he sent a note to Enjolras' office:

_Enjolras,_

_I am sorry and sorry again. I try to be better than myself, but my self will out. I only hope that those qualities of mine that are less detestable will suffice to keep my occasional presence tolerable in private if not public._

_R._

He waited at home much of the day for a reply, and when none was forthcoming, he told his landlord which wine shop he'd be at if a messenger arrived, and went to seek comfort in company. 

He found himself reflecting to one of his companions on his curious fortune:

"When he deputized me to recruit republicans and I ended up drinking and playing dominoes instead, he never chided me. He merely gave me that scornful look." He smiled. "So I suppose it's a sign of progress that he deigns to write me notes now."

His friend kindly refilled his glass. "I suppose one could call it progress if your goal is to be decried rather than met with imperious silence. Really I don't know why you care so much about winning the good will of such a man. That time you introduced him to us, he was boring as a block of wood, scarcely opened his mouth except when Dupont brought up taxation. He's one of those good looking sorts with no personality at all."

Grantaire drained off his wine and bit back the urge to strike him. A weird succession of thoughts fled through his head:

_In what strange universe does Enjolras not shine like the sun at center of whatever room he is in? What is wrong with this man that he doesn't see it? Joly, Bossuet, Bahorel, Courfeyrac, they would never say such things. None of them. Where have--why have--all my true friends gone?_

_Where has my Apollo gone? Is he, indeed, become a block of wood next to the vestal flame he once was?_

He shook his head. "The world makes no sense, my friend. My comrades died for this new government of ours, and what has it given us? Children still starve, men still beg, women still sell. Britain passes its Reform Act but denies its poor the vote. America still keeps its slaves sixty years after a slaveholder declared all men equal. You ask me why I orbit a man who cannot scratch the heavenly cataracts from his eyes to see this world for what it is, and I have no answer except perhaps that his blindness is the faith that gives me strength to see it."

* * *

Yet that answer was obsolete. In truth, Enjolras rarely spoke to him in the old hymn-like strains of revolutionary zeal. He never really had, of course. It was the others he'd spoken to; Grantaire just happened to be there. 

Perhaps it was mostly attachment to the past that made Grantaire knock on Enjolras' door that evening, having kept himself carefully more-or-less sober. 

To his relief, the door opened and while the face that greeted him was unamused, the figure stepped back to let him in.

"I really am very sorry," Grantaire began.

Enjolras took a chair and sighed. Before him on the table was scattered the usual chaos of papers. "You are who you are. That seems an odd thing to be sorry for."

Grantaire smiled tightly. "Odd to be sorry for being incapable of belief, of sacrifice, of life, and of death?"

Enjolras glanced at him with an air of surprise. "I was wrong about that."

The words did not dispell the shadow, but they dispelled some piece of it. 

"May I stay?" said Grantaire. "I shall be quiet as a mouse, and I have an unaccountable terror of going home alone tonight."

Enjolras eyed his papers with something akin to longing. "I'll be working late. I'll be no company."

"All the company I need."

As Grantaire lay in a corner of Enjolras' bed, the lamp flicking red behind his eyelids and the soft scratch of Enjolras' pen in his ear, he reflected that this was his idea of the eternal reward, to rest enwrapped in warmth and friendship.

* * *

Autumn bent toward winter, and they had not spoken for a couple of weeks. Grantaire was certainly not expecting Enjolras to rap again on his door and rouse him from his sleep. His candle was out; the night was dark. His only indication of the time was that he had to piss, which meant it was likely near morning. 

"Who is it?"

"It's me," came the quiet reply.

Grantaire groped for his dressing gown, the chill seeping in as he rose. He stumbled through dim outline of the room and let him in, found a match and lit his lamp, excused himself while he used his chamber pot. When he'd sorted himself out, he joined Enjolras at the drinking table to find his friend's eyes were deep and sad. 

"What time is it?" Grantaire cast about mentally for his watch, concluding that it must be in a pocket somewhere and unwound.

"A little past five."

"What's happened?"

“I thought I'd--forgive me; it's nothing, only I’ve had a letter from my sister. No, this is a ridiculous reason to bother you. I beg your pardon." He rose to go.

Grantaire seized his hand. "Is your family well?"

Enjolras stared at him a moment, then sat again. "Yes. No, it's nothing like that. She was giving me news of my nephew--he’s four, nearly five now. She said he asked if he would see his Uncle Alain--that’s Combeferre, you know, as he always does on his birthday--" He broke off. "It's not fair. It's not fair to him."

Grantaire wasn't sure if he meant Combeferre or the nephew. It didn't matter. "No. It isn't fair. They were rare men, ordinary men, like thousands of others, and yet in their way they seem as Titans to anyone beside them. I might say I have many friends. It is easy to have friends when you're a drinker. And they are pleasant. They are entertaining. Of an evening, their talk is not so different from Joly's or Bossuet's. And yet our friends made a home for me there at the Musain, at the Corinthe, as no others have ever troubled to. Their hearts were human but their souls angelic. And I miss them beyond any power of description." 

Enjolras had studied Grantaire closely as he spoke. Now, he looked off into memory. “Sometimes I still catch myself thinking, ‘Oh, I must ask that of Combeferre,’ and then I remember, and I think, ‘Then, I will ask Courfeyrac,’ and then I remember.”

 _I am still here,_ thought Grantaire, but he knew that was a cold comfort.

"It is good of you," said Enjolras, "to invite me in at this hour. It wasn't necessary. A couple more hours, and I would have had my morning tea and started the day, and all this would recede. It's not worth waking you up to infect you with my low mood."

Grantaire laughed.

Enjolras raised an eyebrow. "Or I may have overestimated your infection."

"I'm sorry, my friend, but the very idea of _you_ lowering _my_ mood. Are you not aware it's my sacred duty to lower the mood of all revolutionary dreamers?"

Enjolras gave him a wan smile. "I have some recollection of it."

A great tenderness for him washed over Grantaire. "And if your heart had been distressed at five in the morning in the old days, you would have gone to Combeferre, and he is gone, and I am left, a poor substitute blended of drink and importunity. And for all of my importune words, I am sorry. I thank God, if God there be, that you live. If you had died--if you had died too, I do not think I could have kept on living. That I can see you--that sustains me. You are still my gilded Phoebus.” 

Though, at present, Enjolras was a little damp. "You always say such things to me. You are infatuated with me."

The statement took Grantaire aback. He had always assumed that his feelings were obvious, while at the same time holding the contradictory view that Enjolras was blind to them. At any rate, he'd been certain that Enjolras would never comment on his adoration. It left him wondering what he was expected to say.

Those sad eyes waiting on him, he began consideredly. "In Athens--"

"Oh, Grantaire."

"I do not mean to offend you. I do not fancy myself to be an honorable man, but I have never felt anything for you I do not consider to be honorable."

"I am not offended. I, too, have read of Athenian love. Indeed, it is easier for me to understand the love between men of common cause than the love between man and woman who live so much in different worlds." He paused. "I don't know if that makes it sound less strange if I say I think I was falling in love with Feuilly."

Feuilly? And yet, of course, Feuilly. A man who was everything Grantaire was not: dedicated, hard working, sober, self-supporting.

Enjolras interrupted his reverie. "I told Combeferre about it once, and he looked at me gently--you know the way I mean--and said, 'I am not surprised such a man would stir your heart.' But I don't think he thought it was that kind of ardor. Maybe it wasn't; I don't know." 

"Why are you telling me this?" It seemed the sort of question that one shouldn't have to ask, and yet he did. He felt his world tipping, but the direction of its tip could not possibly be reality. 

Enjolras answered him only with a look of profound wretchedness.

"Are you lonely?" Now, that was a question that needed no asking. Those seven funerals were the answer. Yet it struck Grantaire that he had never known Enjolras lonely before. He had radiated the confidence of someone beyond such frailty, and Grantaire had assumed that was his nature, to be in a large part beyond human need. It occurred to him now it might simply have been that his need had been satisfied in the bosom of his friends' affection.

Enjolras shook his head just slightly, not in denial so much as speechlessness.

Grantaire reached out a hand and Enjolras grasped it, the first time since that day. He raised that hand to his lips, and Enjolras did not resist him.

"I love you," said Grantaire.

Enjolras hesitated. "I have done nothing to earn it."

"It is not earned, nor freely given. It simply is, like an accident of birth." 

Enjolras looked at him bleakly.

Grantaire’s heart all at once began thundering. He drew his chair nearer, scratching it loudly across the floor. It seemed to him it was nothing like this difficult to woo women--or perhaps he only courted women who were not difficult. A bit too fast, he took Enjolras' face in his hands and kissed him, half expecting to have his ears boxed. He was only kissed lightly in return, a soft brush of lips against lips. He tried again, and they kissed each other deeper, arms reaching out to each other with a sweet yearning that flamed in Grantaire, and delayed a little his realization that Enjolras had stopped kissing him back. 

He drew back, expecting him to get up and leave. Instead, he found himself embraced, a soft, tired sigh near his ear.

"Stay," he said over Enjolras’ shoulder. "It's less than two hours till you'd be up anyway. Don't go home alone."

"Thank you," said Enjolras to his surprise and sat back in his chair.

"Come lie down. It needn't be anything more."

Again, Enjolras surprised him by not resisting the request. He threw off coat and waistcoat and boots, and in his shirt and breeches, lay down. Grantaire drank a little water, suddenly keenly conscious that his breath must be terrible, then slipped in gingerly beside him and doused the lamp.

The bed was too small for two to lie side by side without touching. They lay in rigid stillness in that way that made one aware of every itch and self-conscious about moving to scratch it.

"Are you all right?" asked Grantaire finally.

"I hardly know."

A wave of frustration swept Grantaire. Whatever was to come, they could not simply lie there. So he took his courage in hand and, turning on his side, put a palm to Enjolras' face in the dark, letting his fingers slide through his soft hair. 

Enjolras responded tentatively with a hand moving up Grantaire's arm. They kissed again, Enjolras' lips as tentative as his hands, dry and gentle, seeming at once to need much and little and flooding Grantaire with a sweet desire, not as keen as he felt with a woman but complete and unconflicted in a way he'd never known. In due course, Grantaire's lips drifted to his stubbled cheek, his throat. His flesh had a faint, clean scent that was not familiar though it seemed it should be.

When he swung a thigh over Enjolras' leg, he could feel him hard and wondered for a moment what to do about the clothes between them and what advances would be welcome and what would not. And then he decided that thought had always been his nemesis and simply rubbed against him, pleased to feel him cling to Grantaire in return. 

In the end, it was Enjolras who undid his breeches and put himself into Grantaire's hand. 

"Should I do it to you as well?" he asked, breathless against Grantaire's cheek.

"If you like," Grantaire breathed back.

The folds of his nightshirt made an odd crease between them, but he forgot it when he pushed into Enjolras' hand. Blissfully, for a little while, he forgot to think at all. He climaxed first, and it gave him the joy of watching with a sober eye his friend in the throes of passion, this man whose passion he had heretofore seen directed only at an idea. In response to the flesh, he was simple and sincere, gasping quietly in the final moments.

Afterward, he retreated inside himself. The effect was as immediate as taking a boiling kettle from the stove. He disentangled himself from Grantaire and lay quiet in the first gray of morning. Grantaire watched him an undercurrent of anxiety. 

At length, Enjolras turned to him and said, "This was unwise."

Grantaire smiled tightly. "Rare is the moment when two people come together in bed in the name of wisdom."

"True enough."

* * *

And so they began an arrangement. Its setting soon shifted from Grantaire's rooms to Enjolras', which were larger and more accommodating. Its limitations were extensive. Enjolras would not tolerate Grantaire loquaciously drunk, so half the evenings Grantaire came to see him he got promptly packed off again. 

And even when Grantaire was reasonably sober, Enjolras was often busy or fatigued, or simply not desirous. Some of those nights, he let him stay, and Grantaire fell asleep in the flickering candlelight to the familiar scratch of Enjolras' quill.

Yet perhaps once in a fortnight their lips and their hands would explore each other's flesh. It was curious to come to know the intimate contours of this man who for years had been to Grantaire as a statue atop a temple's steps. Grantaire had long ago memorized his voice, his glance, his way of standing. Now, he memorized his sweat, his breath, the pattern of hair across his body, the place at the edge of his jowl where he had a tendency to burn his skin shaving. His hand upon the barricade had been slick and firm, and now that hand seemed a first indication of a human being having supplanted his god. 

Grantaire was not entirely pleased by this. It ought to be the consummation of desires so high he had not dared to dream them. Yet sometimes in the moist clutch of human flesh, his love seemed thrust out of its Eden.

Enjolras felt the change as well. Once after they were spent, he gazed at Grantaire with a kind of desperation. "I do not know what drives me here. All my life, I never needed this. I assumed that I would live and die without knowing carnal love, and it was no loss to me. Now--" He rubbed a tired hand over his face. "I am weak through to my bones."

For moment, all Grantaire's adoration resurged. Moreover, Enjolras’ words confirmed for him that he was the only person Enjolras had ever touched. It moved him and saddened him suddenly that such an honor should fall to such an object. He kissed his forehead. "My poor fallen angel. You had soared with the gods and are fallen to the earth."

* * *

At the end of February, Pontmercy invited them to dinner. Grantaire had a pleasant if bittersweet time, the pleasantness due to Madame Pontmercy's pretty face, the sweet and bitter from the inevitable talk of old friends, mostly Courfeyrac, whom Pontmercy had known best. 

As they walked home after midnight, swathed in coats and scarves, a late snow crunching beneath their feet, Courfeyrac haunted Grantaire's thoughts. He had understood everyone. He'd known how to follow Enjolras with just enough light mockery of his severity; he'd known how to shut up Grantaire's orations with just the right casual friendliness; he'd drawn out of Pontmercy's prudish hauteur a young man with a passion for justice. Without him, on this winter night, it seemed inevitable that those who were left would scatter like the snow on the wind. 

Without their friends to reflect his light, Enjolras was no longer really Enjolras. Grantaire was still Grantaire, but that had never been enough without their friends’ hands to uphold him.

"It's a pity," Enjolras broke into his thoughts, "that Pontmercy was never really one of us."

"I am given to understand that he became one of us on that day. Didn't you call him the chief?"

"Yes. His service to the Republic was exemplary. And I am heartily glad he survived and has made himself what seems a contented life." They walked a few steps in silence. "But I think at heart he is still a Buonapartist."

Grantaire studied him out of the corner of his eye. "Do you think--do you see any signs that this new Republic may be seduced by a second Bonaparte?"

Enjolras gave a hard laugh. "Buonapartes are born not once in a century, so I suppose it will not happen soon."

It was the most cynical thing Grantaire had ever heard him say. He hardly knew what to make of it. "But the Republic, it seems sound to you?" 

Enjolras frowned at him. "I am surprised to see you take an interest."

They reached the crossroads that would take them home in separate directions, but both took the turn toward Enjolras' rooms. 

"I take an interest in you," said Grantaire a little crossly. "I am tired of seeing you lose yourself in the mundanity of government."

Enjolras stopped in the street. "Lose myself? I assure you I am quite myself."

A man walking by glanced at them curiously.

"Mark my words,” said Grantaire, “you will break yourself on the altar of this vaunted Republic that does not feed the poor or clothe the freezing, keeps the prisons stacked and still denies the vote to the paupers who work the hardest."

"A Republic does not spring into being whole like Athena from the brow of Zeus! Its wheels grind, and it is doing its work. We have introduced legislation to expand primary schooling, to limit child labor. We have already passed legislation establishing a minimum age of sexual consent."

"And such will be the work of your lifetime," said Grantaire, "laboring day and night to get this or that line inserted into this or that proposal. And some of it will do some good, I've no doubt. But for each piece of good, the evils of this world will teem around it, and if you live to be a hundred, you will still die in nation a thousand years away from the realization of your dream for it."

"And your cynicism, as ever, blights progress by refusing hope. But even if you were correct, naturally, I would live and die to bring the Republic one day closer to that realization. You know that."

Grantaire seized his arm, vaguely aware of a bundled-up couple hurrying by them in the empty street. "I know it very well. And just as I surely I know that you're freezing into a living death with each of these trivial battles. You were not made to be a politician. You were born to be a philosophe in the mold of Rousseau, not a common lawyer like Robespierre."

Enjolras gaped at him, for several moments unable to form a reply. "I have studied law ever since you've known me. I have always been a man of action. I cannot be a philosopher like Combeferre, nor a poet like Jean Prouvaire."

"Can you not see that you have always been both? Why must you throw away the purity of your light?"

" _Pro Patria!_ " cried Enjolras. " _Pro Patria mori._ He took a step back, his face contorted. " _Pro Patria vivere._ I would have lived and died more myself perhaps if I had died then with them. But I didn't, and I must live on for her--and for them."

"You there!" came a shout from a window overhead. "Stop that racket--" The man broke off, staring at them in the lamplight. "Citizen," he added shortly and clacked his shutter. 

Grantaire barely saw him, transfixed by the figure before him. "I only meant--" 

"Messieurs?" It was a ragged young woman. "I couldn't help but hear you speak with feeling of helping poor folk. I wonder--"

"Yes, of course, citizeness," said Enjolras digging into his pockets. He handed her some coins, not bothering to look at them.

In the meantime, another beggar had come up to Grantaire, who gave him something; he, too, didn't bother to count how much.

"I am going home," said Enjolras and started off down the street without awaiting a reply.

Grantaire made his way to one of his wine shops, where he played cards for as long as he could make sense of the suits, and ended up taking some plump, blonde thing home. When he woke up the next day, she was gone and his pockets emptied of whatever coin he'd had left.

* * *

The next week saw the publication of scathing cartoon, featuring an attractive young member of the Assembly engaged in a street brawl with a drunken dandy. 

"The humor of it is that I was perfectly sober," said Grantaire to one of his compatriots. 

"Well, never mind. We can soon fix that." His companion called for another bottle. "The trick is not to let these things get at you."

But it was not Grantaire that it was aimed at, not Grantaire who had a public reputation to uphold. He anticipated that Enjolras would avoid him. Indeed, he did his best to make it easy. Apart from a brief note of condolence to which he received a civil and colorless reply, he made no attempt at contact and no attempt was made in return. 

In fact, it was complete coincidence that Grantaire crossed paths with Enjolras and some his friends a week after the cartoon's publication. He'd popped his head into a patisserie one Sunday afternoon, and there they were: Enjolras and five political gentlemen at coffee. He contemplated fleeing, but Enjolras spotted him. He thought he see Enjolras contemplate disavowing recognition of him in return. But then another pair of eyes followed Enjolras', and it was a fait accompli. 

"Grantaire," Enjolras called him over, and he found himself seated in a circle of keen eyed, curiously smiling politicians. 

They attempted to include him their conversation, asking his views of this and that.

Grantaire did his best to reply with commonsense blandness, deploring poverty, promoting gentler working conditions for women, and so on. 

When they asked him if he advocated a particular piece of legislation, he demurred: "I fear I haven't studied it closely enough to venture an opinion."

At this response, Enjolras sighed, and Grantaire could not tell if it was in relief or disappointment.

That talk went on thus for a few strained minutes until, inevitably, someone said, "Forgive me, but am I right in thinking, citizen, you are the one lampooned in that ridiculous sketch by Giroux?"

"I rather thought that was me," put in Enjolras drily.

"I fear it was me, citizen," said Grantaire, attempting a smile. 

"I thought so. It seems to me I have heard of you about town."

"The more fool I to build a reputation to precede me."

"Enough of this," said Enjolras. "My friends, thank you for the coffee but I have work to be getting back to."

"Do stay a while, Enjolras," said one of the younger men. "Since Saint-Pierre has still not given me his proofs, I wanted to go over the revision with you so we have something to fall back on."

"Indeed, I should be going anyway," said the man who'd spoken to Grantaire.

In the ensuing bustle, Grantaire excused himself and stood for a few moments in the cleanness of the air. He was just starting down the street when someone called his name, a man of middle years who'd been one of Enjolras' party.

"Don't take any notice of Jordan," he said. "He likes to be combative. It was wisely done, your sitting with us. Don't let the press see you as fearful."

Grantaire gave a short laugh. "I wasn't fearful that night we ended up bickering in the street, but I didn't see that stop them."

The older man smiled briefly. "It will be nothing, that lampoon. It will be forgotten in less than fortnight." He paused. "I think you were with him in the coup?"

Grantaire nodded.

"That is a friendship that needs preserving. He's an unusual man, Enjolras, older than his years in many ways, and in some ways still very much a youth." He gazed pensively across the street at nothing. "He may simply be one of those men who comes late to the love of a good woman."

 _No,_ thought Grantaire with perturbation. _That is not what he is._

"But for the present, he is sorely in need of a friend. He may be the loneliest man I know."

"I wish I could be nearer what he deserves," said Grantaire, his thoughts fleeing back to Combeferre, whose face in his mind's eye had grown distressingly dim.

"They do talk of you, you know. Even before that cartoon, they did. Jordan once asked him why he let himself be seen with--if you'll pardon me for saying so, citizen--someone not always adept at holding his wine. And he stared him down with that gaze he has and said, 'That man was prepared to die with me, and I will never forsake him.'"

* * *

Five nights later, Grantaire got home late to find Enjolras waiting in his room.

Grantaire cackled, the whole thing suddenly blindingly amusing. "This is not a good time, Adonis--Apollo--whoever you are. You will not like the object you see before you this time in the night." He gave an exaggerated bow and nearly lost his balance.

Enjolras rose. "You're right. We'll speak tomorrow when you're sober." He moved to go.

Grantaire caught his arm. "Oh, we'll speak when you declare we speak, as ever, is that it?"

Enjolras pulled his arm free.

"Don't go," said Grantaire more seriously. "It has been so long since I have had occasion to drink in your marble face."

Enjolras turned to him, glowing like some painting of David's brought to life. "My landlady knows about us--about our relation."

Grantaire giggled again, feeling himself transported into some gothic romance.

"She is well disposed toward me. She's been a friend since before the coup. She told me for my own good, Grantaire. She said it must be obvious to any chamber maid with a head on her shoulders."

Grantaire half fell into a chair. "And well, so what? It isn't a crime."

"But I am a public person," Enjolras snapped. "I cannot do my work if I'm mired in scandal."

"I liked you better when you didn't care so much for your reputation."

Enjolras gave him a hard look. "And I myself."

Suddenly, Grantaire felt like crying. It was obvious what was coming next. It had always been obvious. 

"I have thought and thought," said Enjolras, "about how we could forestall talk on this. It wouldn't help to meet here at your rooms; I must assume your chamber maid has much the same powers of perception as mine."

Grantaire laughed weakly. "We could split a mistress, like Joly and Bossuet. No one would think anything of it."

Enjolras seemed to seriously entertain this. "But to find a woman one could trust implicitly, who would be a confidante and not torn by jealousy? Women like Musichetta are, I think, very rare. And if you know one I encourage you to make her your mistress."

"They fly quite out of my orbit, I'm afraid. Whatever happened to Musichetta?"

Enjolras sat beside him. "Gone to Brussels, last I heard, to be a governess."

"Never! A girl like her to waste her youth away buttoned up to the chin minding grubby-fingered children?"

"She had the education for it, and it pays better than being a grisette."

Grantaire scoffed. "It would pay still better and be much more enjoyable to be a wealthy man's mistress. She could have who she liked."

"Perhaps her sentiments are not as nimble as that!"

Something cracked in Grantaire. "Of course. You are quite right." All at once he was weeping as if he had been for years. "She could bat Joly around as a cat does a mouse, but there's no doubt she loved him dearly. Is there no end?" He looked up at Enjolras like a child seeking comfort. "No end to these echoes of misery that reverberate upon the ears like the chords of some giant organ constructed by Satan for the torment of this world of Jobs?"

Enjolras made no immediate reply. After Grantaire had cried for a space, he said, "The most reasonable answer seems to me that we should lodge together." 

Grantaire repeated this in his head, trying to make sense of it. "I beg your pardon?"

"We should rent rooms together."

"That will make people titter about us less?"

Enjolras leaned back in his chair. "It won't stop the talk about your dissolute influence, but that part will bend to the truth: that you have been my staunch friend and I am yours in return, even if I disapprove of your drinking. Lodging together will, however, make our relations appear much more natural than our present spectacle of showing up at each other's rooms in the night. Some may talk, but what weight will they carry? That two old friends room together is nothing strange."

A clucking came out of Grantaire. He could not tell if it was laughter or sobbing. "Can you tolerate so much of my company?"

Enjolras considered. "I do not know. But I suppose, when it comes to it, I am often not home and you are often out late."

Grantaire flung his arms around him.

* * *

On 6 June, 1833, the nation celebrated the anniversary of its liberation from the monarchy. Enjolras was occupied all day with official ceremonies and not a few laurels heaped upon his particular brow. 

Grantaire kept well clear of it, occupying his own day with the delicate task of drinking enough to dull the pangs but not so much as to be useless at whatever point--probably late--Enjolras got home. He ended up walking the streets much of the day. The weather was fine; music rang out; flags flew; people laughed. It seemed a terrible wound somehow that that day of blood and desperation should be so remembered. And at the same time, it seemed precisely the conclusion that his friends would all have wished, that their sacrifice had made the nation happy.

He sat by the banks of the Seine for a while, closed his eyes, and summoned up all their dimming faces: Combeferre, whose passing had forever carved a piece out of Enjolras' heart; Jean Prouvaire, perversely first to fall; Feuilly, man of all peoples; Courfeyrac, the warmth that even this summer day could not replace; Bahorel, so unquenchable his mortality seemed to defy some law of nature; Bossuet, marching bravely to the nadir of his bad luck; Joly, who--as if in fulfillment of some prophecy--had died with a head cold if not of it. 

His last clear memory of Joly and Bossuet was drinking with them at the Corinthe in those last hours before the Corinthe had become a scene of slaughter. They had been drinking and talking merrily. His next memory of them was looking at their corpses. 

Sitting by the river, he cried and laughed in remembrance of his friends and prayed that they would forgive him for sleeping through their last day on earth. He knew that if he had been awake he still could not have saved them. Yet he had failed them all the same. 

"I am glad you had each other," he whispered. "And please look kindly on my frailty, as you always did in life."

In the afternoon, he crossed paths with a parade and caught a glance of Enjolras in a red waistcoat, on horseback, shining with such unreal perfection it reminded him of paintings of Bonaparte, a comparison Enjolras would despise so profoundly it brought a smile to his lips. 

He got home around 8 o'clock and spent the next two hours stoking the fire and monitoring the level of his wine glass as if he were involved in a chemistry experiment.

Enjolras got home just after ten, gave his coat over the housekeeper, accepted her felicitations, waved away her offer of refreshment, and ushered Grantaire into their small library. There he stood, wind-rumpled and looking lost.

"Busy day," Grantaire remarked, his own voice catching.

Enjolras seized him in a fierce embrace and sobbed. For a long time, they sobbed together, and though they could not extract each other’s pain, they clung to the solace of a sympathetic soul.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is partly a (late) Christmas-or-holiday-of-choice present to the fandom and partly an experiment to see if I could write E/R in a way that is a) not wildly implausible and b) not exceedingly depressing. I'll leave you to judge my success.


End file.
